


Sleepless

by thecryoftheseagulls



Series: Logan Hawke [10]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Insomnia, Introspection, M/M, Nightmares, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 14:50:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5874820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecryoftheseagulls/pseuds/thecryoftheseagulls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an old, old drabble I found which features Logan being unhappy late at night in Act 3, when Anders starts pulling away from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepless

It’s third bell in the morning, and Logan can’t sleep. Anders is sprawled out on his stomach on the bed beside him, asleep from the moment he stumbled in a couple of hours ago and his head hit the pillow. There’s a part of Logan that wants to kiss him awake just so he can hold him, but it wars with his logical side, the side that says Anders needs his sleep and desperately. Logan finally sighs and leaves the room.

In the library, he stirs the ashes of the dying fire back to life and adds a few logs – more than is strictly necessary – until the fire is blazing again. As if the heat and the light could chase away the emptiness inside him. It can’t and Logan knows it. He pours himself a few fingers of Antivan brandy, the fancy kind, one of few luxuries he lets himself splurge on these days. Not as though his mother needs the money he so carefully saved for her and Carver anymore. For a moment, Logan has the thought that he’s turning into Uncle Gamlen, wasting his parents’ money in an attempt to get back at the world. But then he remembers his grandparents died of old age and sickness, and his mother was murdered by a crazed blood mage. If he wants to drink his grief away, he damn well will do as he pleases. Most of his money is being funneled into the mage underground these days, anyways.

Logan sighs, leaning on one forearm against the mantelpiece. It’s not about his mother, not really. It’s about the man he loves in his bed, about how he can feel Anders slipping away from him more with each passing day. And what it feels like is death, the slow kind, as everything bright about the world is slowly stripped away until only shades of grey remain. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be Tranquil. Except the Tranquil don’t grieve over their loss of a connection to the world. Logan’s insides are hollowing, as everything he’s ever loved or guarded has been slowly stripped from him. Anders is the last of many, but he isn’t taken by sickness or ogres or madmen, he’s stepping away of his own volition, and it’s a gradual separation, not an instantly cauterized loss. Logan is bleeding to death, but slowly, so slowly.

He knows what he wants, and it’s the same thing that Anders does – the freedom for all mages to live their lives away from the tyranny of the Circle and the templars. But he’s given so much to this damn city, and he’s tired of the shouting in the streets, the terrorized mages, the terrorized civilians, the demands of the nobles that he step in. What Logan wants is to run away, leave this demon-infested city in his dust, but he won’t go without Anders, and Anders won’t leave while there is still work to be on behalf of the mages. And it seems Logan can’t help him, not really, not overtly. So Anders draws away, committed to his cause, and Logan just gets more tired, more lonely, waiting up long hours until Anders finally returns to his bed. And even then Logan cannot sleep, knowing – fearing – each night might be the last one Anders returns.

So he’s in the library. Drinking in the middle of the night. Because when he falls asleep, he dreams of Anders tranquil, Anders captured, Anders executed, Anders dead in the street in a pool of his own blood. It would be almost amusing, all the myriad ways his subconscious comes up with for Logan to lose him, if Logan didn’t wake every damn night with tears in his eyes, reaching out for a man who, half the time, wasn’t beside him.

Logan slips to the floor and puts his head in his hands and cries. Maker forgive him, once he thought he was strong, once the world was simple around him, right was right and good was good and now – now he loves a man most would call possessed more than he loves his own soul, and to see Anders safe he would…the things that he would do don’t bear talking about. In his dreams, he snaps every time he finds Anders’ body. Sometimes there is a demon and Logan is no better than any of the desperate blood mages he despises so much in this city. Sometimes he walks into the Chantry, cries out against the Grand Cleric’s failure to stem this conflict, and blasts Elthina so full of lightning she is nothing but ash when he’s done. Usually it’s Meredith, and every other templar he can get his hands on, and the method for her death is always different. Logan has no illusions. He is not a good man, if he ever was one, and the world is a harsh and unforgiving place. He has so much blood on his hands already.

Logan falls asleep that way, curled in on himself on the rug before the fire, the bottle of brandy half-empty beside him.


End file.
